The present disclosure relates to a heat assisted magnetic recording head gimbal assembly that comprises a heat assisted magnetic recording head executing heat assisted magnetic recording, which is one of the techniques to improve areal density of hard disk drives drastically, and a suspension of the head, and further relates to a hard disk drive using the head gimbal assembly.
In recent years, heat assisted magnetic recording has been developed to significantly improve the areal density of hard disk drives. One promising development is the incorporation of second-generation actuators into the head gimbal assembly for increased head positioning accuracy, which delivers better performance, data integrity, and overall drive reliability. Compared to first-generation actuators, the second-generation actuators have a lighter mass with a correspondingly vibrational resonance frequency, which allows a more rapid and accurate head positioning. One proposed approach is to couple a second-generation actuator to the suspension of the head gimbal assembly.
However, simply incorporating second-generation actuators into existing head gimbal assemblies using conventional approaches would lead to a deterioration in the performance of the heat assisted magnetic recording head. For example, to accommodate the actuator, the slider would require a wider landing zone at an outer area on the magnetic disk, thereby leading to a decrease in the recording area. Moreover, the performance of existing actuators is deteriorated by the larger weights of heat assisted magnetic recording heads, which may be up to 60% heavier than non-heat assisted magnetic recording heads. Thus, simply configuring existing actuators onto a conventional head gimbal assembly using conventional approaches would result in increased vibrations and reduced shock resistance, thereby deteriorating recording performance.
In addition, if an existing actuator were attached to the suspension, the motions of the actuator would limit the possible areas on the suspension where the slider can be attached, limiting them only to areas of the suspension on a trailing side of the dimple. Thus, the incorporation of the actuator would limit the possible areas of the suspension where the slider can be attached. Since a lower proportion of the total area of the suspension would be dedicated to attaching the slider, this would subsequently lead to a lower bonding strength between the slider and the suspension, which would reduce the operational reliability of the head gimbal assembly.